Chapter 2

The next evening, Rowan was waiting outside the schoolhouse.

He carried a wineskin of the honeyberry wine that used to be my favorite. But when he held it out, I smelled twice the usual amount of syrup. Sabine had a sweet tooth, and Rowan never forgot that. The fact that I disliked sweet wine, however, had clearly stopped being worth his attention long ago.

"You didn't come back last night?" he asked.

"I was in class."

Rowan's brow furrowed. "With a pack of pups?"

Sabine came out from behind him, a small silver bell lying in her palm. A pup's paw print was carved into it, and it rang clear and bright at the slightest shake.

"For you," she said. "Bells like this help Silent Bloods practice scent work. All the little ones use them."

A few apprentices leaving class stopped in the doorway and stole glances at us. I suddenly remembered the pack hunt the year I turned sixteen, when I heard something crawling beneath the rock in the heavy fog and grabbed Rowan to stop him from going forward. He shook off my hand and said I was only scared. Later, part of the fissure collapsed. No one died, fortunately. But the report in the Youth Council's files said I had panicked and lost control during the mission.

Rowan was the one who had filed that report, too.

"Save it for someone who really needs it." I pushed the bell back.

Sabine's eyes reddened at once. "I only wanted to help you."

"Then stop deciding what I need."

Rowan's voice went cold. "Elara, you always treat kindness like an attack. You can't even handle a pack hunt, and you still want to enter the Moon Selection?"

I did not answer. He thought silence could still push me back into who I used to be, but this time I only walked around them both and shoved open the schoolhouse door.

Cassian laid three moonstone shards in a row on the table. The first was smeared with pine resin, the second with blood, and the third looked as clean as if it had just been pulled from the well.

"Tell apart the echoes they left behind," he said.

I tried once and got it hopelessly wrong. The second attempt went the same way. Every time I rushed to grab at those sounds, they scattered like startled birds.

"Don't chase," Cassian said. "An echo isn't prey."

"But I can't hear them clearly."

"You're listening too hard." He set one hand flat on the table, his fingers long and steady. "Fear pulls its sound inward. A lie curves around the thing that matters. A vow stops at the place it refuses to be forgotten. Sort them apart first, then we can talk about judgment."

I recorded my answers and replayed them again and again. By the nineteenth replay, my ears ached and felt swollen. Cassian remained under the lamp, pointing out every mistake, and not once did he ask why I still had not learned.

After the twentieth replay, he picked up the third moonstone.

"What's inside this stone?"

I closed my eyes.

Damp wind blew from a gap that did not exist. Somewhere far away, someone said, [Don't open the door.] Beneath it all ran the faintest thread of laughter, like a silver bell ringing underwater.

"Someone... took something that wasn't hers," I said.

Cassian watched me for a long moment before he nodded. "Pass."

Outside the window, the silver bell Sabine had left lay quietly by the door. No one noticed that the fine needle on its inner rim had grazed my fingertip and carried off a thread of essence almost too faint to see.